3 ms·

But someone did suggest Base64!

• mercurial 12y ago
  Multiple someones, including someones with fancy titles.
• tedunangst 12y ago
  Base64 does have one use: assume you need to store a plaintext password because you need your service to login to another service. (Use oauth, yada yada. Not everybody has it.) base64 coding passwords prevents support staff from trivially seeing and learning passwords when poking about the database. It's not to protect the password from bad people, it's to keep the good people from accidentally learning something they don't want to know.